Many Children At Risk On Reading, Tests Show

About 40 percent of Florida's kindergartners are at risk of struggling with reading, with up to 22 percent at "high risk" of failure, according to the first statewide screening of youngsters' early literacy skills.

About 175,000 children underwent screening at the start of this school year. At least 58 percent of them had needed skills, meaning they could identify letters and some letter sounds. Those children likely will learn to read with little trouble.

But 37 percent to 42 percent of the group -- about 70,000 children -- showed a lack of basic skills, suggesting they'll need extra help to become solid readers.

State education officials said Tuesday that the newly released information, while sobering, isn't unexpected, as it mirrors national figures on students who start school ill-prepared for lessons.

"It's a lot of kids across the country that are at risk of not meeting higher standards of reading," said Pat Howard, director of assessment for the Florida Center for Reading Research, which helps oversee the literacy screening.

"It's kind of a sad commentary, I suppose, but maybe it's going to help us even more strongly focus our efforts."

The information, Howard and others said, should eventually help reduce the failure rates on the reading section of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which students take in grades 3 through 10.

That's because the information from the kindergarten "readiness" screenings should help schools provide intensive instruction to students at the start of their schooling, when it is easier to make up deficits.

"As we say in the training, catch them before they fall," Howard said.

For years, Florida has administered "readiness" screenings to incoming kindergartners. But those screenings assessed developmental readiness for school, testing such things as whether kids could hop on one foot or describe a picture.

By that screening, 84 percent of the children tested at the start of the current school year were ready for school.

But that assessment doesn't delve into skills needed to absorb reading lessons, said Joseph Torgesen, director of the state reading center at Florida State University.

The state used two tests to evaluate prereading skills, part of a nationally recognized package known as DIBELS, developed at the University of Oregon.

One test gauged youngsters' ability to name upper- and lower-case letters presented out of alphabetical order. The other tested their ability to name the starting sounds of words. For example, students were shown pictures of a whale, a fence, tools and a stick, and then were asked to identify which picture begins with the sound of the letter W.

The ability to easily name letters and beginning sounds is a key skill as students start learning to read, experts say. So the tests are considered good predictors of who will learn to read with ease and who will struggle.

Statewide, 20 percent of kindergartners were at high risk on the letter-naming test, and 22 percent were at high risk on the initial-sounds test, meaning they scored well below grade level and need serious help if they are to catch up. Another 17 percent to 20 percent were at "moderate risk" on the two tests.

On the positive side, 48 percent of Florida students scored above average on the letter-naming test, as did 39 percent on the initial-sounds test.

As typically happens, students in Central Florida's more well-off counties of Brevard and Seminole did better on the kindergarten screenings than those in poorer counties, such as Osceola and Polk.

The results, officials said, highlight the need for pre-kindergarten programs that focus on early literacy. Florida is to start its free pre-K program in August -- and that will make the new literacy screening controversial.

In a move many educators opposed, state lawmakers decided that pre-K providers will be judged on how their students do when they start kindergarten and are given the tests.

The state expects to set a "readiness rate" this summer, deciding what percentage of students must be ready for school for a pre-K program to pass. Pre-K providers that fail for several years could be kicked out of the state program.

Educators don't like using the readiness tests to judge pre-K programs, mostly because such a system doesn't take into account where the students started when they enrolled in pre-K as 4-year-olds, so it doesn't give credit for progress.

But many say the tests can help schools pinpoint who needs help.

Robert Allen, principal of Tangelo Park Elementary in Orange County, said the Oregon tests are an "excellent assessment" that have helped teachers focus on reading skills early on in kindergarten in a way the old assessments did not.

"Of course, the bar has been raised a little bit," Allen said. "We've had to look at real academic things rather than the social, touchy-feely sort of things."

The new assessments aren't helpful, though, unless schools use the results to provide students with assistance, Allen added.

At Tangelo Park, students who score in the "high risk" category are getting 30 minutes of extra literacy lessons a day, reading coach Mitz Oates said.